“Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.” -Mark Twaincartoon via

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” -Mark Twain

It seems fitting that my earliest childhood memory entails strife, conflict, and intense emotion. It also seems appropriate that the Roman Catholic Church was involved. I was 5 or 6 years old. My family was out in Michigan visiting during a summer vacation. I attended a day camp run by a Catholic order, a sort of Bible day camp. I recall the presence of nuns. Another little boy started teasing me. He hit me with a vine, using it in the manner of a whip. This infuriated me. I fought back with a ferocity far beyond the pain I'd absorbed and beyond the bounds of a little boy trying to defend himself. I jumped on the kid and started pounding him with my fists. When he escaped my grasp, I chased the terrified boy around some picnic tables. The nuns stopped me, but they couldn't staunch my rage, which kept flooding out of me, a deep volcanic upswelling at the injustice of the boy's attack. I wept and thrashed and couldn't be consoled. Eventually the nuns, who despite their experience had never encountered this sort of emotional intensity from a child, had to call my mother to come get me. I remember that day: the stinging thrash of the vine; the deep green of the grass and trees; the startled white faces of the sisters under their habits; and my outpouring of rage that, even at that young age, I felt coming through me rather than from me. I sensed that I was a conduit of forces beyond my understanding and perhaps beyond my control.-Alberto Salazar and John Brant, 14 Minutes: A Running Legend's Life and Death and Life

A gentle wind fans the calm night:A bright moon shines on the high tower.A voice whispers, but no one answers when I call:A shadow stirs, but no one comes when I beckon.The kitchen-man brings in a dish of lentils:Wine is there, but I do not fill my cup.Contentment with poverty is Fortune's best gift:Riches and Honour are the handmaids of Disaster.Though gold and gems by the world are sought and prized,To me they seem no more than weeds or chaff.-Fu Hsuan (translated by Arthur Waley)

..............until I found the previous quote. Turns out that John McCarthy was fairly quotable. Below are selections culled from here:Mankind will probably survive even if it doesn't take my advice.

Equality of the sexes is more important than equality of the genders.During the second millenium, the Earthmen complained a lot.When there's a will to fail, obstacles can be found.You are eager to defend rationality against the creationists. Fine. Are you also willing to defend it against the environmentalists? Cynicism is a cheap substitute for sophistication. You don't actually have to learn anything. God did not design human beings in accordance with Christian principles, fascist principles, feminist principles, socialist principles, romantic principles, secular humanist principles, vegetarian principles, deep environmentalist principles, biocentric principles, or libertarian principles. Any of these groups could have told God a thing or two.No-one has yet built a monument so high that a bird can't fly over and shit on it.The peace movement is a great force for peace. Some of the world's most quarrelsome people act out their aggressions through the peace movement. Self-righteousness has killed more people than smoking. It is deplorable that many people think that the best way to improve the world is to forbid something. However, they're morally more advanced than the people who think the best way to improve the world is to kill somebody. Don't try to talk anyone out of concentrating his hatred on Ayn Rand or any other dead person. It can't harm the dead. Diverted to a living person, it might actually do harm.

John Kay suggests, recent headlines notwithstanding, that flying is one of the safest things we do.............................

Tyler Brûlé has described the fear of flying that led him to abandon a flight to London after hearing about last week’s Germanwings Airbus crash in the French Alps. The chances of a man of Mr Brulé’s age, 46, dying in any two-hour interval is about one in 1m. There is an additional one in 5m chance of being killed during a two-hour flight. On the other hand, sitting in an aircraft protects you from many more common causes of death, such as a car crash or a fall down stairs.Full essay here.

“Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy - in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other.”-Robert A. Heinleingif via Kenton Nelson

"On land we wiped out the mammoths and sabre-tooths first, then bison, gazelles and rabbits and by the end were left eating grass seeds. In the sea, it was the same and in many areas we are now down to the prawns and shellfish. No other predator has the flexibility to do this “fishing down the food chain”, which is what makes our species so lethal.""We tolerate the utter devastation of the seabed by nets and dredges, increasingly assisted by powerful engines, synthetic materials, sonar and electronics. Seabeds could be a veritable aquarium of reefs of water-cleansing shellfish and corals, even in the North Sea, instead of a waste of silt and rubble. We would not drag nets through forests."

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.” -Herman Melvillevery cool photo courtesyof David Kanigan

Out of the mud two strangers cameAnd caught me splitting wood in the yard,And one of them put me off my aimBy hailing cheerily "Hit them hard!"I knew pretty well why he had dropped behindAnd let the other go on a way.I knew pretty well what he had in mind:He wanted to take my job for pay.Good blocks of oak it was I split,As large around as the chopping block;And every piece I squarely hitFell splinterless as a cloven rock.The blows that a life of self-controlSpares to strike for the common good,That day, giving a loose my soul,I spent on the unimportant wood.The sun was warm but the wind was chill.You know how it is with an April dayWhen the sun is out and the wind is still,You're one month on in the middle of May.But if you so much as dare to speak,A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,A wind comes off a frozen peak,And you're two months back in the middle of March.A bluebird comes tenderly up to alightAnd turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,His song so pitched as not to exciteA single flower as yet to bloom.It is snowing a flake; and he half knewWinter was only playing possum.Except in color he isn't blue,But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom.The water for which we may have to lookIn summertime with a witching wand,In every wheelrut's now a brook,In every print of a hoof a pond.Be glad of water, but don't forgetThe lurking frost in the earth beneathThat will steal forth after the sun is setAnd show on the water its crystal teeth.The time when most I loved my taskThe two must make me love it moreBy coming with what they came to ask.You'd think I never had felt beforeThe weight of an ax-head poised aloft,The grip of earth on outspread feet,The life of muscles rocking softAnd smooth and moist in vernal heat.Out of the wood two hulking tramps(From sleeping God knows where last night,But not long since in the lumber camps).They thought all chopping was theirs of right.Men of the woods and lumberjacks,The judged me by their appropriate tool.Except as a fellow handled an axThey had no way of knowing a fool.Nothing on either side was said.They knew they had but to stay their stayAnd all their logic would fill my head:As that I had no right to playWith what was another man's work for gain.My right might be love but theirs was need.And where the two exist in twainTheirs was the better right--agreed.But yield who will to their separation,My object in living is to uniteMy avocation and my vocationAs my two eyes make one in sight.Only where love and need are one,And the work is play for mortal stakes,Is the deed ever really doneFor Heaven and the future's sakes.-Robert Frost

The human brain is not a computer.Your mind is alive.And it’s motivated.Once you’ve come to terms with this mad reality.Everything in life will suddenly become clear.-Tom Asacker, as excerpted from here

One of Sunday's posts linked to Walter Russell Mead opining on the "free fall" of American foreign policy in the Middle East. On the surface, I have difficulty understanding our current foreign policy. All I believe for certain is that our current president's predecessor's decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam will be looked at by historians fifty years from now as one of the all-time great blunders. The execution of said decision certainly has led to the Mother of All Unintended Consequences. What a mess. The voices raised against the president's treatment with Iran are loud and persuasive. But, I'm not convinced they offer a better suggestion. Feel free to call me confused about the Middle East; I won't be offended. One of the reasons I just purchased The Fall of the Ottomans was to add some contextual knowledge. I'll let you know how that turns out. In the meantime, I'm just going to go along with Roger Cohen in his recent NYT op-ed:

"I like the current inconsistencies in President Obama’s Middle East policy."

We liberals always talk about how the right needs to rein in its crazies but the left has some crazy reining in to do too. Unless you think I am creating a false equivalency, I'm not. Because on the right, unlike the left, they have actually been able to carve out a place for their crazies; unfortunately, that place is elected government.-Bill Maher, as excerpted from here.

3. Media voices, politicians and others that create panic for a living need to own responsibility for the way their actions dramatically magnify the cost we all pay.-As excerpted from Seth Godin's post, "The Panic Tax."

“Sometimes when I reflect on all the beer I drink, I feel ashamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. I think, 'It is better to drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver.” -Attibuted to, but probably not said by,Babe Ruth

Money quote here:“I would never let the muddy waters of retirement swallow up my old carcass while my mind was still functioning and my hands were free of the stiffness of arthritis and inertia. I was only eighty years old. I had to keep busy.”

Walter Russell Mead take a peek at the "free fall in the Middle East" and our "mainstream media."It still doesn’t want to admit that the “smart diplomacy” crowd has been about as effective at making a foreign policy as the famous emperor’s smooth-talking tailors were at making a new suit of clothes. But it’s getting harder and harder to find anybody willing to gush about how snazzy the President looks in the sharp foreign policy outfit that he’s sporting around town.